Chesterton Day by Day: The Wit and Wisdom of G. K.
Chesterton
by G. K. Chesterton

For any author, much less a 'rolicking' journalist often
caught up in the passing controversies of his day, the
writings of G. K. Chesterton have shown remarkable staying
power. During his life, this talented British writer was
the private friend and public foe of writers such as George
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Two-thirds of a century after
his death, the ideas of Shaw and Wells seem curiously
quaint and dated, while Chesterton's writings remain fresh
as the day they were written. That's why many of Wells
later and more political writings are out of print while
more and more of what Chesterton wrote is finding its way
back onto the shelves of bookstores.

The reason simple. Chesterton is one of the most quotable
writers of the twentieth-century. He has an incredible
knack for capturing in a few concise and memorable words
what other authors labor and groan to say over many pages.
Lengthy books have been written to explain the essence of
Fascism and its close kin Nazism. Few have come as close as
Chesterton did when he remarked that, "The intellectual
criticism of Fascism is really this: that it appeals to an
appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the
authority for the appetite." That is Hitler's Fuhrer
Principle in a nutshell, and it also why so many followed
the German dictator into madness.

For this book, Chesterton selected a reading from his
writings between 1900 and 1911 for each day of the year and
for each of the "moveable" Christian feasts. Here are some
examples.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found
wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
-January 13

Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty
has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was
never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about
himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been
exactly reversed. . . The old humility was a spur that
prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot
that prevented him from going on. For the old humility
made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make
him work harder. But the new humility makes a man
doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working
altogether. -April 2

It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of
it that an institution like the liberty of speech is
right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man
utter follies and abominations which you believe to be
bad for mankind any more than it is natural or obvious to
let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect
half a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free
speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and
more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much
better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is
a theory which has been justified upon the whole by
experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a
very surprising theory. It is really one of the great
discoveries of the modern time; but once admitted, it is
a principle that does not merely affect politics, but
philosophy, ethics, and finally, poetry. -May 9

It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who
brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my
mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were
quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the
Freethinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled
mine horribly. The rationalists made me question whether
reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished
Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the
first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I
laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll's atheistic
lectures, the dreadful thought broke into my mind,
'Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.' -December
21

Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the
Scientifically Organized Society
by G. K. Chesterton

In the second decade of the twentieth century, an idea
became all too fashionable among those who feel that it is
their right to set social trends. Wealthy families took it
on as a pet cause, generously bankrolling its research.
The New York Times praised it as a wonderful "new
science." Scientists, such as the brilliant plant
biologist, Luther Burbank, praised it unashamedly.
Educators as prominent as Charles Elliot, President of
Harvard University, promoted it as a solution to social
ills. America's public schools did their part. In the
1920s, almost three-fourths of high school social science
textbooks taught its principles. Not to be outdone, judges
and physicians called for those principles to be enshrined
into law. Congress agree, passing the 1924 immigration law
to exclude from American shores the people of Eastern and
Southern Europe that the idea branded as inferior. In 1927,
the U. S. Supreme Court joined the chorus, ruling by a
lopsided vote of 8 to 1 that the forced sterilization of
men and women was constitutional.

That idea was eugenics and in the English-speaking world it
had virtually no critics among the "chattering classes."
When he wrote this book, Chesterton stood virtually alone
against the intellectual world of his day. Yet to his great
credit, he showed no sign of being intimidated by the
prestige of his foes. On the contrary, he thunders against
eugenics, ranking it one of the great evils of modern
society. And, in perhaps one of the most chillingly
accurate prophecies of the century, he warns that the ideas
that eugenics had unleashed were likely to bear bitter
fruit in another nation. That nation was Germany, the "very
land of scientific culture from which the ideal of a
Superman had come." In fact, the very group that Nazism
tried to exterminate, Eastern European Jews, and the group
it targeted for later extermination, the Slavs, were two of
those whose biological unfitness eugenists sought so
eagerly to confirm.

As the title suggests, eugenics is not the only evil that
Chesterton blasts. Socialism gets some brilliantly worded
broadsides and Chesterton, in complete fairness, does not
spare capitalism. He also attacks the scientifically
justified regimentation that others call the "health
police." The same rationalizations that justified eugenics,
he notes, can also be used to deprive a working man of his
beer or any man of his pipe. Although it was first
published in 1922, there's a startling relevance to what
Chesterton had to say about mettlesome bureaucrats who
deprive life of its little pleasures and freedoms. His tale
about an unfortunate man fired because "his old
cherry-briar" "might set the water-works on fire" is
priceless.

That tale illustrates Chesterton's brilliant use of humor,
a knack his foes were quick to realize. In their review of
his book, Birth Control News griped, "His tendency
is reactionary, and as he succeeds in making most people
laugh, his influence in the wrong direction is
considerable. Eugenics Review was even blunter. "The
only interest in this book," they said, "is pathological.
It is a revelation of the ineptitude to which ignorance and
blind prejudice may reduce an intelligent man."

History has been far kinder to Chesterton than to his
critics. It's now generally agree that eugenics was born of
a paranoia fed by evolution and by the "ignorance and blind
prejudice" of social elites. But never forget that
Chesterton was the first to say so, condemning what many of
his peers praised.
The completely new edition of Chesterton's classic includes
almost fifty pages from the writings of Chesterton's
opponents to illustrate just how accurate his attacks on
eugenists were. For researchers, it also includes a
detailed 13-page index.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through
government is Science. The thing that really does use the
secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is
levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that
really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed
that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues,
and spread not by pilgrims but by policeman--that creed
is the great but disputed system of thought which began
with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.

G. K. Chesterton's Early Poetry: Greybeards at Play,
The Wild Knight and Other Stories, The Ballad of the White
Horse
by G. K. Chesterton

Here under one cover are G. K. Chesterton's first three
books of poetry: Greybeards at Play (1901), The
Wild Knight and Other Stories (1901) and The Ballad
of the White Horse (1911).

Greybeards at Play deserves far more attention than
it has thus far received. In his contribution to G. K.
Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, the poet W. H. Auden
praised it with these words: "I have no hesitation in
saying that it contains some of the best pure nonsense
verse in English. . . . Surely it is high time such
enchanting pieces should be made readily available."

The playfulness of Greybeards at Play contrasts
dramatically with the historical importance of The
Ballad of the White Horse. During one of the darkest
moments in World War II, the front page of The Times
of London would quote these memorable words from it: "I
tell you naught for your comfort, Yea naught for your
desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet and the sea
rises higher." They expressed better than anything else the
great trials England was passing through just five years
after Chesterton's death.

In his great epic, Chesterton had done with English history
what Tolkien would later do with his imaginary history of
Middle-earth. He had molded events and placed them in a new
light to give meaning and purpose to history. As Chesterton
would note on the book's title page, he agreed with King
Alfred that, "I say, as do all Christian men, that there is
a divine purpose that rules and not fate."